Back in April of 2020, climate deniers like Marc Morano were exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic, and more specifically the efforts to protect public health, as a rallying cry against climate action. Then, in the fall of 2020, an economist warned that we’d need to take climate action now to avoid a future in which a “climate lockdown” is the only option to protect the public from the ravages of the climate crisis, and again we saw deniers like Morano spin that around as a supposed embrace of the idea.
Deniers, particularly Morano, have continued to hammer on this point, occasionally getting picked up on Fox News thanks to Tucker Carlson, and a new report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) examines the life of this lie.
The ISD report provides a timeline of how professional disinformers, particularly Morano, have exploited people’s fears about COVID-19 to push their climate denial, and seeded the idea among the wider rightwing disinformation ecosystem. “As populations recover from the trauma of the pandemic,” the report says, “there is greater fear and grievance to capitalise upon, and a broader constituency who could be turned against climate action.”
UK’s Channel 4 briefly interviewed Morano about this at Heartland’s denial conference last weekend, and when pressed to name a single example of someone calling for a climate lockdowns, a flustered and increasingly irate Morano instead cited someone saying the pandemic recovery would be an opportunity to “reset” capitalism. Which, to be clear, is not someone calling for a climate lockdown.
But obviously reality has little relevance for deniers, and the lockdown fear mongering continues.
From Morano and the Fox News set, the ISD report notes that it’s also being picked up by the far-right, “the QAnon community or outlets such as Red Ice, an online media entity run by Swedish neo-Nazi Henrik Palmgren, who has been pushing a version of the climate lockdown narrative since February."
It’s not just Nazis, though, as the Daily Caller (which does have a sordid history of hiring a bunch of white supremacists over the years...purely coincidentally, we're sure) published a story based solely on quotes from professional climate deniers just last month, followed by Bjorn Lomborg in the Wall Street Journal.
Importantly, as coverage by Lottie Limb at Euronews.green notes, the upcoming COP26 could potentially be derailed by disinformation, as is denier tradition. That’s why ISD and others are calling on social media companies to clean up disinformation on their platforms.
And as the report makes clear by showing how it’s a limited cast of characters who spread these lies, the easiest way to do that would be to ban those who spread disinformation for a living.
Taking the social media megaphones away from those who are yelling “no fire” in a burning theater and doing false advertising on the industry’s behalf would be a quick and easy way for Facebook et al. to clean up their platforms and protect users from disinformation.
It’s not a lockdown that Morano should be scared of, but instead a social media lock-out.